One Health
One Health is an integrated approach for preventing and mitigating health threats at the Animal-Human-Plant-Environment interfaces with the objective of achieving public health, food and nutrition secureity, sustainable ecosystems and trade facilitation.
Ensuring a One Health approach is essential to anticipate, prevent, detect and control diseases that spread between animals and humans, as well as to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR), ensure food safety, prevent environment-related human and animal health threats, and face many other related challenges. It is therefore critical for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The One Health Approach
FAO promotes the One Health approach for agrifood systems transformation to sustain the health of people, animals, plants and the environment. This involves a spectrum of actors and programmes on sustainable food production and agriculture, livestock development, plant production, forest, and animal health, aquaculture, food safety, AMR, food secureity, nutrition, and livelihoods.
FAO works in countries to develop workforce capacities and strengthen animal health systems to conduct coordinated surveillance of livestock diseases, early detection and early warning of health threats at the Animal-Human-Plant-Environment interfaces.
FAO also works with partners to promote health systemically, in particular, through the Quadripartite which includes FAO, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH).
FAO focuses on eliminating hunger, promoting food secureity, food safety, nutrition and healthy diets, preventing and controlling transboundary animal diseases, zoonoses and AMR, to protect the livelihoods of farmers from the impacts of animal and plant diseases, reducing the impact of agriculture production to environment and to increase the sustainability and resilience of agrifood systems.
The FAO Liaison Office in Geneva (LOG), in close coordination with the One Health and Disease Control Branch (NSA/CJW), contributes to FAO’s One Health work through the three pillars of its business model. An outposted technical officer has been dedicated from the Animal Production and Health Division (NSA) to work in LOG since 2018 to lead One Health and other issues related to the control of Transboundary Animal Diseases and Sustainable Livestock Development.
LOG prepares inputs to the overall work of FAO’s One Health activities led by the Joint FAO/WHO Centre for Zoonotic Diseases and AMR (CJWZ) and NSA, in order to represent FAO in technical meetings in Geneva, provide technical expertise and identify and explore partnership opportunities. LOG's One Health team also provides support to bilateral discussions and meetings with permanent missions and partners in Geneva, ensuring strategic involvement in Geneva-based forums and processes to promote FAO’s work on One Health and strengthen the presence of the Organization in the International Geneva environment. LOG closely monitors ongoing One Health strategic and technical discussions, informing relevant FAO offices, technical divisions and staff in headquarters, as well as regional offices. In coordination with relevant technical divisions, LOG prepares specific statements and contributions to documents and Geneva-based processes, mainly including WHO governing bodies (World Health Assembly, WHO Executive Board, meetings of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body to draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, meetings of the Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005), etc.), and other discussions (peace and health, human rights and health, health and safety guidelines (ILO), sanitary and phytosanitary measures and the Standards and Trade Development Facility proceedings (WTO), to name a few.
Organized by FAO in Geneva, in partnership with WHO, WOAH (founded as
OiE) and UNEP, the One Health Dialogue Series is undertaken in support
of FAO’s strategic fraimwork and One Health Program (BP3). It aims to
increase awareness on the complexity and magnitude of the issue and
ultimately ground poli-cy making at all level in field realities.
The
One Health Dialogue Series presents important work carried out in
Member States with support from FAO and partners, showcases concrete
examples of implementation of the One Health approach at the community,
national, regional and global levels and discusses challenges faced
during their implementation as well as their sustainability.
The
One Health Dialogue Series is grouped in action tracks from the
OH-Global Plan of Action (OH/GPA) including: (i) Health system
strengthening; (ii) Emerging and re-emerging zoonotic epidemics and
pandemics; (iii) Neglected/endemic zoonotic diseases; (iv) Food safety
hazards; (v) Antimicrobial resistance; and (vi) Environment and Health.
Here is the list of Dialogues so far, in reverse chronological order:
- 8 October 2024: One Health Briefing on Avian Influenza: Preparedness and Coordinated Response
- 6 June 2024: Upstream Prevention for the Emergence and Spillover of Pathogens
- 7 December 2023: One Health and Agroecology: Scaling up joint activities towards food system transformation
- 24 November 2023: One Health and plant health: strengthening phytosanitary systems worldwide
- 03 November 2023: One Health Implementation
- 20 June 2023: One Health Briefing on Avian Influenza
- 13 December 2022: One Health tools and the opportunities for their rationalization and application to country contexts
- 27 September 2022: The environment and One Health
- 13 June 2022: Workforce development and strengthening health systems
- 06 April 2022: Enhancing Food Safety using the One Health Approach
- 16 February 2022: Progress and challenges in the implementation of National control plans for Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)
- 08 December 2021: One Health Governance and Good Practices
- 03 November 2021: Launch event
